The Chronicle of Higher Education examines challenges to mainstream economics (Economists Push for a Broader Range of Viewpoints in Their Field):
Recently critics have mounted a more fundamental line of attack on mainstream economists, taking aim at the ideology that has grown dominant over the past 30 years, which they say played a significant part in causing the Great Recession and not doing much to help solve it.
The dispute, which has been echoed in critiques made by Occupy Wall Street activists, has roiled blogs, op-ed pages, and university campuses. Students at Harvard University recently walked out of one prominent professor's class.
Critics call this ideology "free-market fundamentalism," and it rests on certain core tenets: The market is the most efficient way to allocate resources; people generally make rational decisions when buying goods and services; and government regulations are to be minimized because they risk undermining purer market forces and can lead to corruption. ...
Critics want an alternative vision—or visions—of the discipline to be more widely accepted. "We need an economics that aims to secure long-run human well-being, not an economics preoccupied with maximizing short-run output and profits," reads the mission statement of a new group, called Econ4, which was started at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in September. ...
The founders of Econ4 want the economy, and the study of economics, to pay more attention to such issues as the fair distribution of opportunities; to emphasize minimizing vulnerability in the economic system instead of maximizing efficiency; and to strive to give a fuller accounting of the costs and benefits of market and government decisions, including consequences for the environment and the value of caring for dependents.
Here is the link for Econ4: http://econ4.org/. This Econ4 video makes it seem as if the entire profession ignores market failure when, in fact, it is a major chunk of the micro principles course. How is "true cost pricing" different from Pigouvian taxation?
Econ4 - The Challenge from Softbox on Vimeo.
